Pope John Paul II - Silver Jubilee

On Thursday 16 October 2003 the Catholic Church worldwide celebrated Pope John Paul II's Silver Jubilee, 1978-2003. To mark the occasion, we invite you to a meeting at the College of the Cardinals to discuss the future of the Catholic Church.

In 2001, Pope John Paul II called an "extraordinary consistory" of his College of Cardinals. It was a meeting at which a number of important questions were discussed, concerning the present state (and the future) of the Church. Radio National's The Religion Report at the time put these same questions to a number of representatives of various faiths.

Lyn Gallacher: As you may have heard, this week John Paul II is presiding over a meeting of his Cardinals to discuss the future of the Catholic Church. The meeting is called an Extraordinary Consistory...

So, to give the Pope his due, we here at The Religion Report have called an Extraordinary Consistory of our own, and we've invited everyone from all faiths and none, to consider the Papal topics.

Here's the agenda: Pluralism; world poverty; globalisation; the mass media; is the church projecting holiness; is there a discrepancy between ordinary Catholics and official Church doctrine on matters of sexuality; and, how can Catholics maintain their identity?

Michael McGirr, writer and former Jesuit priest, is the first member of our Extraordinary Consistory. So is this an interesting set of questions?

Michael McGirr: It certainly is, it's a very wide-ranging list of questions. It's hard to think of anything that isn't covered in some way, shape or form. One of the problems is I guess it's hard to imagine that with such a wide-ranging set of questions, whether or not they're going to get down to much nitty gritty.

Lyn Gallacher: But do you think it's important that they're being asked?

Michael McGirr: Yes, I think it's very interesting. Especially one, for example, about there being a discrepancy between ordinary Catholics and official church doctrine on matters of family and sexuality. Because the official line, as I've often heard it has been, that when Catholics for example, disagree with the church line on family and sexuality, it's because they haven't understood it or because they're a bit stubborn or something like that. And I just see in this a little bit of exasperation and even a bit of head-scratching, saying, 'Well hang on, why is there such a gap between what the church says on paper and what people actually do in their lives'. And I just see a little chink of light there, that maybe there'll be a bit of the official Church coming to terms with reality.

Lyn Gallacher: You don't think it's a way of sorting out who's who for the future? You don't think this is the Pope trying to pick his men?

Michael McGirr: I wonder about that. I don't think the Pope is going to have much say in the future to a great extent, I think he's an old man now, and I think he's got enough grasp of reality to know that soon somebody else will be filling his shoes and it won't be up to him to pick that person. I just hope that the Cardinals who gather are enough in touch with the way people live and with the struggles of the people they meet, both in the Third World and in the Western World and so on, just to tell true-life stories, not so much to the Pope as to each other, and I hope there's enough real-life storytelling and not just trading in clichés and generalisations.

Lyn Gallacher: Is it possible to do that at a meeting that's this politically charged?

Michael McGirr: And more than that I would suspect, very structured; 183 people, very limited time to speak, it's curious thinking of, having read things that have been said at meetings of Bishops, especially in Rome in the past, even Bishops who, when you meet them are rather easygoing and so on, speak in a very formal way, almost like they're negotiating a cause with certain nods in certain directions and so on. I mean you kind of hope that a group like this would come together and it would be rather different than a political meeting.

Lyn Gallacher: Let's just imagine for a second that you're a Cardinal -

Michael McGirr: Well I think that really is a leap of the imagination. I've never looked that good in red, I must say.

Lyn Gallacher: - And so one of the questions is about poverty, and the question is, how can the church best tackle world poverty and globalisation. So would you tell a story if you were a Cardinal at that meeting, in response to that question?

Michael McGirr: The kind of story I'd tell I suppose would be one in which the church were able to put aside its ceremony or its garb or its sense of its own importance, simply to be able to respond and to listen and so on. And I guess when you look at St Peter's Basilica for example, or even the places in Rome where Cardinals gather, now of course they're great works of art, but a pretty far cry from Mozambique recovering from a flood, or that kind of thing, and I think even the architecture that surrounds those meetings do sometimes suggest a kind of divorce from reality.

Lyn Gallacher: Michael McGirr, author of Things you Get for Free and former Jesuit priest.

The second of our imaginary Cardinals is Dr Muriel Porter. She's an Anglican laywoman and a religious commentator. The idea that there might be a discrepancy between ordinary Catholics and official Church doctrine on matters of family and sexuality, makes her blood boil.

Muriel Porter: It's an obvious, blatant fact that there's this huge, not a discrepancy but a huge yawning gulf, simply and purely because the Catholic Church is led by celibate males. By definition they have to be totally out of touch with ordinary Catholics, ordinary people on matters of family and sexuality. So it's not a discrepancy, it's a huge yawning gulf.

Lyn Gallacher: All right, now how do you feel about the issue of world poverty and globalisation?

Muriel Porter: I think as long as the churches spend all their time worrying about who's in and who's out on the rule books and whether people are practising contraception, abortion, having sex before marriage, outside marriage, all the rest of it, as long as they're tinkering with all of those intensely private and individual matters, they won't have the time or energy or frankly the credibility to tackle the really big issues of our world in this millennium, which are world poverty and globalisation.

Lyn Gallacher: And the mass media?

Muriel Porter: Well I think that's the hardest one of all. I think, in a sense, all the other things I've been speaking about have to come to pass before the mass media will want to take the churches seriously. The mass media is not foolish; most of the time it senses instinctively that the churches have no real credibility any more in the community at a widespread level. As long as that's true, the mass media therefore will ignore them. When the church is behaving in a Christlike way, doing as Christ did, I imagine the media will come flocking to our door.

Lyn Gallacher: Dr Muriel Porter.

Now seeing as two of the Pope's questions deal with how the Catholic Church should respond to religious pluralism, it seemed only fair to get the responses from other faiths. So David Rutledge conducted a survey and collected these responses.

Rabbi Leslie Bergson: I think that Judaism is at its best in a time when religious pluralism is the way that people accept, because it's not at all a foreign concept to Jews. We've never postulated that the whole world should be Jewish, so I think that the more religious groups move away from the concept that they alone hold The Truth, the better environment it is for Judaism.

Dr. A. Bala: Historically, Hinduism has survived for thousands of years in a pluralistic society. The main reason for their survival is because Hinduism is not a proselytising religion and respects other religious beliefs. Our religion is individual in its orientation and is centred in the home, and to a lesser extent in temples. So far the family structure is very important, is sacrosanct within the Hindu community, so the family is bound together and Hinduism has survived. It's true that in the Western world there are new challenges, and nuclear families are on the decline. These are trends that are difficult to predict, so I think we will have to watch, and probably Hinduism will have to change, adapt to these changes.

Nada Roude: I think any religious community would obviously be very concerned about the various influences that one would encounter living in a secular society, but I think for the Muslim community our concern is Yes, there may be concern that we're not reflecting Islam the way Islam should be reflected, but I think when you live in a nation where there is diversity of religions and cultures, you have to interact within those communities, and you have to be prepared to basically take the challenge without having to be apologetic, if you like, about your ways of life and your belief systems. There may be a lot of differences, but I think we need to focus on the commonalities, and the things that strengthen us and bring us together as people.

Venerable Tejadhammo: Buddhism is quite happy to sit side-by-side with other traditions. The only comment I'd make about that is the idea itself of modern Buddhism; I prefer to talk about modern Buddhists rather than modern Buddhism, because I don't think any such thing actually exists. So it seems to me to be far more important, not that various Buddhist groups keep their distinct identity which I think in the long run is impossible, all of these things are impermanent, they're all in flux, and the more we try to hang on to them, the more we try to fix them, the further we actually move away from the teaching of the Buddha.

David Rutledge: Is all change welcome though? I know you would say change is inevitable, but are there threats?

Venerable Tejadhammo: Well I suppose there are, but I think change is just the nature of things, isn't it. So there's no point in jumping up and down about change. It's a question of dealing with it skilfully.

David Rutledge: A few voices from Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist communities, responding to the question of how best to preserve one's religious identity in a changing world.

I also spoke to Father Michael, of the Russian Orthodox monastery of St Petroc in Tasmania. The Russian Orthodox Church has had it pretty tough during the last hundred years or so, with persecution under the Soviet regime at home, and the privations of exile abroad. But exile isn't necessarily a bad thing for religion, in fact many Jews will tell you that exile is precisely what has given Judaism its characteristic identity.

So I asked Father Michael if the same mixed blessing has shaped Russian Orthodox Christianity.

Father Michael: Well Orthodoxy's been around for 2,000 years; it's managed to keep itself quite distinct and secure for 2,000 years. It's suffered a lot of persecution over time, it's not just in this century with the Communists in Russia and other countries, but also prior to that in Turkey, with the invasion of Islam and so on, and it continues to be under pressure in the Middle East, and very considerable pressure. So Orthodoxy has learned over the millennia; it doesn't so much adapt itself, it just knows how to handle itself when it's being persecuted. Christianity always works best in periods of persecution. It in a sense, you might say toughens it up, but it sorts out who are the real Christians.

David Rutledge: So would you say then, would your message to the Pope this week as he convenes his Cardinals for this meeting where they're going to discuss the future of the Catholic church, do you think that this secularisation that seems to be worrying the Pope, is something that could actually turn out to be good for the church in the long run, because it's going to have that toughening effect?

Father Michael: That's different. You have to look at the differences, in a sense, between Orthodoxy and the other Christian organisations in the world. Orthodox Christianity doesn't have a pyramid power structure, with a single point of power at the top from which all government and all decisions are initiated. Neither is it a professionally managed democracy.

Now both of those structures are liable to corruption over time, one, because individuals or small groups of distant elite can be easily subverted by Satan into governing on entirely human terms. The other, because it enables infiltration, quite easy infiltration, of liberal humanists with their agenda, capturing the organisation. Now both of those kind of organisations, the infiltration of them, and the takeover of them, has happened to Christian organisations in this past century. Now Orthodoxy has historically relied on the whole membership jointly holding and being responsible for keeping securely of the whole faith, it's not the exclusive task of Patriarchs or Bishops or Priests, but everybody equally. So it's very difficult from outside interest to entirely capture the church, as has happened with other Christian organisations.

Now you take the early church in the British Isles and Western Europe. Right at the beginning it was surrounded by active Paganism. The later church, by the end of the first millennium, had a triumphalist flavour about its worship, because it seemed to have won the battle. That triumphalism is quite misplaced today. We're back in the surrounding Pagan world, and we need a means of addressing it. So by going back and seeing how our forefathers dealt with the surrounding Western Pagan societies 1500, 1800 years ago, and reviving our genuine Orthodox Christian heritage, we can bring it to bear on that society around us today.

An interesting little aside: most of the people who approach me because they found out from our website what we're doing, or something like that, are young people who want what we're doing. They realise that a lot of people are experiencing an emptiness at the centre of their life - people outside the church, people who are in no church at all. And mostly they cannot, even to themselves, articulate what that emptiness means.

They're often repelled by what they perceive as the relative sterility of mainstream Western Christianity. Now Orthodoxy is essentially a mystical Christianity - although when it needs to be, it can be extremely practical. But they are starting to see that it is essentially a different way of answering the needs, it doesn't need therefore to somehow prettify itself up or to suit some particular fashion of the time. If the faith is real, if God really exists, if the whole of the Christian message is true, then it doesn't need to change anything.

David Rutledge: And it doesn't bother you that young people might be approaching the Orthodox church as a sort of selection in the salad bar, if you like; you think that once they get into it a bit they will find that it's not just another choice?

Father Michael: Oh that's made very clear. Nobody joins the Orthodox church easily. You don't just sort of bowl in and say 'I think I'll join this church this week and then wander off next week'. We don't let you. You'd be in inquirer for quite some time before anyone even received you into the Orthodox Church. We want our people to be serious about it, and so if they weren't serious when they started, they will be when they're officially received.

And David Rutledge with that collection of responses to the Pope's agenda for the Extraordinary Consistory.

Lyn Gallacher: Now to broaden the Consistory further, here's the input we received from you, our listeners.

Man: I think the Cardinals should be advising the Pope to be very careful in the appointment of people to high office in the church and make sure that they are interested in promoting the gospel values, rather than the church as an institution, as sadly some recent appointments in Australia would seem to indicate that they are looking at. And the church should be putting service above all else, service of people above all other considerations, particularly considerations of the institution.

Woman: I think the Pope should reconsider his ruling on inter-communion. I find it very hurtful if I'm with a non-Catholic and I'm allowed to approach the altar, but the non-Catholic is not. I feel very strongly about this.

Man: I think the Cardinals will concentrate very much globalisation as we call it, what the French call 'worldisation' and what Pope Pius VI called enculturation. In other words, how much control will there be of the church from Rome and how much will the local Bishops Conference be allowed to decide things.

Woman: I'm interested in the Pope's question on how the church can keep its distinct identity secure. I'm nearing 70 now and I've certainly changed beyond recognition from infancy in the 30s, my teenage years, to working mother, wife, and finally mature age student in the 90s. But I believe it's all these 'I's that make up my single identity. And they've been formed because of all those influences, throughout those years.

I'd like to know what the church defines as its distinct identity and why our generational and cultural differences seem such a threat. I mean it seems to me that the church has got a stance from the 1st century on the very important issues of population control - it's no longer Go forth and multiply for goodness' sake - and the place of women in the scheme of things. I really would like to see them come into the 21st century, and they would not lose their identity if they did that.

Lyn Gallacher: A few of your responses to our Extraordinary Consistory which we're conducting in response to the Pope's meeting with his Cardinals in Rome this week.

The problem for the Church however is a classic one, as answers to the Pope's question could lead to constraining presuppositions about reality, because in a sense, this is what all ideologies do. The Ten Commandments are a classic example. They are a set of conclusions that tell us how we should live our lives. And this of course is part of the contradiction of being human. On one level we want to be manipulated, to know what the rules are and know what to think. But on another level we want to be free. So maybe that's the real question for the future of the church. Does the church try to impose its presuppositions onto humanity, or does it admit that those presuppositions are manipulative, and attempt to set people free?

Michael McGirr.

Michael McGirr: You know that's a really interesting question, and I suppose when you talk about religion you're talking about an area in which people experience great vulnerability, and when people look at an institution such as the church and see its strength, and see the way that some of its leaders present this rock-like edifice, what they forget is that actually the reason people are in religions is because they appreciate, as human beings, they are weak and vulnerable. And a religious community is kind of, the image I sometimes have, is of people huddling together for strength and support, not of people tyring to present a stone-like exterior to the world. It's actually a gathering of the weak.

So therefore it's an area in which religious experiences in the area in which people are easily put upon or manipulated. And I think the church, the Catholic church at least, is only of recent times, beginning to take itself to task for times when it has actually manipulated people and made use of them. And in some ways I'm sure, it still does that. But the Pope last year went out of his way to apologise for occasions on which the church had infringed people's religious liberty. Now he didn't, I don't think, suggest that that was still going on; I'm sure it still is.

I'm sure people still feel at every level of church involvement, a little bit of arm-twisting, a little bit of moral blackmail. That always I think, clouds what Christianity is always about, which is the basic message that you at your weakest can somehow also be free. That I think is a profound thing, and well, after 2,000 years I think it's yet to get through.

Lyn Gallacher: Michael McGirr, former Jesuit priest and author of Things you Get for Free.

Our last imaginary Cardinal is the comic best known as Flacco. His real name is Paul Livingstone, and he's written a show about Freud, which is currently playing in Sydney. Paul Livingstone's Freud is a guru figure who manipulates reality in order to formulate his theories. The story is one of self deception: Freud imposes a diagnosis on a patient by reinterpreting her symptoms. And it's a self deception which has religious overtones.

Paul Livingstone: Many people have compared Freud to fundamentalist Christianity in that sense. The whole process of psychoanalysis, of extracting the truth, extracting confession, all those things are very similar, and also he's been described as an inquisitor, accusing people of having these thoughts and these horrible fantasies as well, that he needs to impose to make his theories work.

Lyn Gallacher: And it's interesting that self delusion and authoritarian megalomania have to work hand in glove.

Paul Livingstone: Oh yes, they do. People are not attracted to the doubter or the person who's unsure, they're only attracted to the megalomaniac. The megalomaniac is a magnet for people I think, who are frightened.

Lyn Gallacher: Do you think that there's kind of a wider thing that you can expect your audience to reflect on in a play like this, about imposing your view on other human beings?

Paul Livingstone: I hope so, I hope it's about the danger of precisely that. And I tried to do it through humour basically because I think it's an effective way actually, to get that across. It could be Freud, it could be Jesus, it could be any of those figures that we put up there, and I think we can put Freud with Jesus, because I think the discipleship, the guruship, the attraction of the followers, the whole substance of what they do is very similar. And Freud himself was a kind of Messiah I suppose to the people around him, and he remains to this day to the pro-Freudians, an absolutely untouchable figure in their minds. And this is always dangerous to do that.

It's a comedian's job to just pop those big balloons you know, it's my job to get stuck into those authority figures, whoever they are, to people who take themselves far too seriously.

Lyn Gallacher: And people who maybe set down rules about how we should live, such as what you should do with your body, whether or not it's OK to have an abortion or masturbate, or whether or not it's OK to be gay.

Paul Livingstone: Yes, to draw certain lines on how other people should live their lives outside of yourself is not a good way for a civilisation to work, I don't think. I don't think you can carve the mystery up like that, I think it's far too broad.

Lyn Gallacher: All right, well it might be a good time for me to put some questions to you about the future of the Catholic church here. Now, just absolutely off the cuff, see how you as not a man dressed in a red frock would cope with this.

Paul Livingstone: OK, all right. I do have a red frock, but I'm not wearing it today.

Lyn Gallacher: Well how do you think the church can best convey the Christian message in a world of religious pluralism?

Paul Livingstone: Pass. Oh the church has to open up, it's quite simple. I think it's a very difficult thing for the church to open itself to new ideas. I mean it tends to take them 300 to 400 years to actually catch up with the rest of civilisation, and I think they're in danger if they don't go along with it, if they don't open up and see what's happening.

Lyn Gallacher: What about is the church projecting holiness?

Paul Livingstone: Is the church projecting holiness? That's an interesting question, I'm not sure what that means.

Lyn Gallacher: Is there a discrepancy between ordinary Catholics and official church doctrine on matters of family and sexuality?

Paul Livingstone: Oh look, I think most people who call themselves Catholics don't live a Catholic lifestyle at all.

Lyn Gallacher: So the answer there would be Yes.

Paul Livingstone: Yes.

Lyn Gallacher: And how do you think the Catholic church should be using the mass media to better convey Christian values?

Paul Livingstone: The mass media? I think they need a reality television show. You just put a bunch of Catholics in a room and put a camera on them and see what happens for a week.

Lyn Gallacher: Paul Livingstone, thank you very much for joining us.

Paul Livingstone: Thank you.

Lyn Gallacher: Paul Livingstone...

That's it for today, thank you as always to John Diamond and David Rutledge, and special thanks to Rabbi Leslie Bergson of Claremont College in California; Dr Bala of the Hindu Council of Australia; Nada Roude of the New South Wales Muslim Women's Association; and Venerable Tejadhammo of the Association of Engaged Buddhists. We also enjoyed the input of all you listeners who wrote in, left phone messages and emailed us. Thank you.

Jubilee Mass- St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney
The Silver Jubilee of the Pontificate of Pope John Paul II will be celebrated by the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney with a Jubilee Mass. Includes Photo Gallery and a detailed timeline of Karol Wojty³a's life.